


babe, it's my bloodline

by atlantisairlock



Category: Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - John Wick (Movies) Setting, Blood and Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence, Organized Crime, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 11:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14954264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlantisairlock/pseuds/atlantisairlock
Summary: When Lou is nine, Debbie saves her life, and in turn, Lou pledges it to Debbie.Somewhere between a mix of Dark!AU and Underworld!AU and Crime!AU.





	babe, it's my bloodline

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Ares](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9927665) by [EssayOfThoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts). 



> mentions of nine ball, constance & amita, but they don't play a really big role. claude becker isn't ever explicitly mentioned but He's There & spoiler alert he dies, good riddance. 
> 
> title from 'hit & run' by greyson chance.

When Lou is nine she wakes up screaming in a burning house, throat choked with thick smoke and half-blinded, her lungs filling with poison. Around her, her room blazes red and orange, blinding bright, licking hungrily at her flesh, and the whole world smells like death. 

She screams herself hoarse and throws her weight against her bedroom door, the blaze unbearable against her bare soles, begging for someone to help her, to come for her, anyone,  _anyone, please._

She is still screaming when the door bursts open in an explosion of splinters and roaring heat and an angel, haloed in darkness and eyes wild with vengeance, scoops Lou into her arms and buries Lou's head against her chest, covering her face. 

"Close your eyes," the angel orders. 

Lou closes her eyes, and the world goes black. 

 

 

When she wakes up again it is two days later and she is on a soft bed in a small room, smelling clean and sharp and white. There is no angel by her bedside, only a fourteen-year-old girl with dark hair and one arm swathed in bandages, watching her quietly. When Lou stirs, she says nothing, simply takes a glass of water and presses it into Lou's hand. "Drink." 

Lou drinks. Keeps her eyes on the girl, never looks away.

And the girl looks on as well.

 

 

The girl leaves the room when Lou empties her glass, and returns a minute later with an older man who looks strikingly like her, his shoulders broad and his eyes just on this side of kind. 

He tells her that Lou has spent the past forty-eight hours slipping in and out of consciousness, shrieking her lungs out when awake and fidgeting, whimpering, crying when not. He tells her they have treated her wounds as best as they can, and she is safe where she is. That she is under his protection -  _their_ protection - and no one will touch her while she is within these four walls. 

His voice is gentler when he tells her that her parents are dead, killed by a family warring with his own - that they were good people, and did no wrong, and their lives were taken for no better reason than to feed the senseless greed of a cruel man. He waits patiently while Lou cries and cries and cries, and the girl goes to her side and puts her arms around her and lets Lou cry into her shirt for what feels like hours. He says nothing while she does so, simply stands and averts his eyes and waits. 

He is still there when her sobs finally subside. He apologises for being too late to save her parents. He apologises to the girl - his daughter, Lou realises - for realising too late that there was one more person in the house, not figuring out quickly enough how to save Lou without necessitating the girl risking her life to do so. 

And then he lays down his offers. 

"You will stay here until you are healed," he tells her. "And when you are back on your feet again you may go anywhere you wish. Whatever you choose, you will be under my protection until you turn eighteen, and anyone who harms you will have to answer to the Oceans. If you should have any other relatives living and wish to stay with them, we will find them for you and bring you to safety. If you should wish instead to live alone, we will give you lodging on our grounds in whatever form you choose. You may go where you like, how you like, and rest easy that you are guarded." 

She can do that. She can do what she wishes, go where she likes, have her freedom and her safety -

Or. 

Or she can be their vassal, he says. She can kneel and pledge her fealty to them, and serve in their ranks. She will fight for them and swear her life to them and bend the knee to them, and in return, she will have her revenge. They will teach her to fight, to wound, to kill, and the day they take their battle to the Beckers, she will be on the front line, prepared to take the head of the man who killed her parents, and return to her ashes of her home drenched in blood and glory. 

He tells her she has until she is healed to make her choice, but really, it isn't a choice at all.

 

 

For two weeks, she lays in bed and lets her body recover, regain its strength, and the girl stays by her side. She brings Lou her meals, and wrings cold towels against Lou's forehead when her temperature rises, and sings her to sleep when her mind is fevered by memories of the fire. She never, ever leaves.

Lou doesn't even know her name, finds out that she will not be allowed to know it unless she bends her knee and takes their crest, because this is how this world she has stepped into operates. One of many rules she has to learn. 

And, she decides, learn them she will. 

 

 

Two weeks later she is not yet fully healed but she staggers off her bed anyway, ignoring the girl's protests, and makes the girl lead her to her father's office. 

He doesn't seem surprised to see her, doesn't seem surprised when she goes on one knee in front of him and bows her head. He extends one hand in front of her and she presses her lips to the cold metal of his rings, and pledges her blood, her name, her life.

Unto death. 

He smiles, and she smiles back, all teeth, no mirth, determined. He beckons his daughter closer. "Your liege," he tells her. "Deborah Ocean." 

 

 

Deborah -  _Debbie,_ the girl corrects the moment they leave the office - is her father's younger child, with one older brother, Daniel, who goes by Danny. She is fourteen and up until the day before, was the only Ocean who had no guard of her own. 

Lou is made Debbie's guard for a reason, she is told. Debbie's father stands before her and makes sure she remembers this, branding it on her brain. Lou is made Debbie's guard not just because Debbie saved her life, not just because this is her debt to owe and repay. She is made Debbie's guard because Debbie saved her life, and in this world, that makes her Debbie's responsibility for the rest of her life. Debbie is sworn to Lou as much as Lou is sworn to her, and it is a bond that goes even beyond blood, a bond that must be taken with utmost seriousness. 

Lou never forgets. The night she is moved onto a mattress in Debbie's bedroom, she bends her knee once more, brings Debbie's knuckles to her lips and swears Debbie's life above her own, unto death, and beyond it, and means every single word. 

 

 

Her training is gruelling and relentless, pushing her beyond any conceivable limits and rubbing her raw. Her first year in the Oceans' service, her muscles never stop burning and her throat is always hoarse. She breaks more bones than she ever knew she had, stains her skin with blood, and she never, ever cries. She learns to throw a punch that will take a life. She learns how to survive and fight back if someone pushes her head into water and keeps her under for five minutes. She learns how to take five people down when she only has one bullet left in her gun. She learns to speak more languages than the average person hears in their lifetime. She learns to flatter and charm and manipulate. She learns how to leap from a building ten storeys tall and survive the drop down. She learns how to run ten miles without ever stopping. 

When she is twelve and Danny is twenty, Debbie's parents make Lou fight him and teach her how to win. When she is fifteen, she is given the blueprints of a property owned by the Beckers and told to figure out a way to enter, extract two hostages imprisoned in the basement, and escape without being captured - then execute it within one week. When she is seventeen, she and Debbie are dropped in the middle of a foreign country, the land plateauing around them for miles and the only street signs in a language they can't read, with nothing on either of them but their clothes and their passports. Debbie is told to figure out her way home in twenty-four hours. Lou is told to do the same and protect Debbie from any dangers they might face while they are at it. 

Lou passes every single test with flying colours and never, ever stops pushing herself to be even better. 

 

 

The day she turns eighteen, Debbie's father comes to her with a thin folder and places it in her hands. In it is nothing but a photograph, a name, and an address. 

He does not need to tell Lou that this is the man who killed her parents. He does not need to give her any further instructions. He does not even warn Lou not to leave Debbie defenceless while she executes her own revenge. Lou simply spends a week making her plans, then goes to Debbie and lets her look through them. Debbie scans them thoughtfully, head cocked, and smiles - rapacious, hungry. "A good plan. Excellent, even."

Lou lets herself be open, truthful around Debbie - only Debbie, always - and her smile is wide and real. "I'm going tomorrow night. He will be dead by morning."

"We," Debbie corrects her, reaching out absently to stroke her thumb against the back of Lou's hand, and Lou lets her. Lets her follow behind her when they exit their house the next night, break into their target's apartment and take his life. Debbie does nothing more than to help hold him down as Lou slits his throat, exceedingly slowly. For years, now, Lou has known her place - one step behind Debbie, her vassal and her protector before anything else - and in this, Debbie knows hers. She watches, keeping her hands clean of blood and letting Lou take her deserved revenge the way she deems it right - this has, after all, never been her blood to shed. 

They return to the grounds with Lou's hands dripping, her jeans stained, her heart wildly full. 

 

 

She is the not the first vassal the Oceans take, and certainly not the last. She is, however, their youngest, and the only one to be permanently assigned to one Ocean. Debbie's parents have a couple selected guards they rotate in and out, and Danny has never kept a guard more than three years. But Debbie does, keeps Lou by her side and never even seems to consider swapping her out from someone else. 

Being Debbie's guard, Lou rarely interacts with anyone outside the family, except the few times she is instructed to go up against another vassal as part of her combat training. She comes to know some of the others, all also taken in as children or teenagers after narrowly escaping becoming collateral damage in a war that was not their own. There's Leslie, who only responds to Nine Ball and teaches Lou the way around a computer system, who keeps a photo of her sister with her at all times and burns the man who killed her alive. There's Constance, light-fingered and quick on her feet, who never says a word about who she lost but comes home one afternoon covered in blood that isn't her own. There's Amita, who even Debbie's parents defer to when it comes to gemstones and jewels, who tells Lou about her mother and sister and brother-in-law, goes out and sets a bomb and then comes back with her lips set in a grim line but light in her eyes. 

They all leave, eventually, their vengeance taken and their thirst for revenge quenched. They go to Debbie's parents and ask for their freedom and are always granted it. They are always told that the door will remain open for them, and in turn, every single one of them swears their life once more, swears that should the Oceans ever be in dire need, they merely need to call and they will come. Lou knows the offer would be open to her, now that her revenge has been taken as well, and she could join the ranks. But she never asks, and she stays, and never leaves.

 

 

It takes Debbie two months after Lou's successful operation to crack and finally ask. 

"You have taken your revenge," she says, looking so bewildered, so disbelieving, so strangely lost. "My father has delivered what he promised and you have gotten what you want after all these years. Why do you not ask for your freedom?" 

Lou knows Debbie doesn't understand, doubts she ever truly would, because all these years and all the sweat she's shed hasn't  _just_ been about blood for blood, has never been. Of course it's been about two dead innocents and of course it's been about a nine-year-old girl screaming in a burning house, but it's also always been about an angel breaking down a door and bringing her out of the dark and staying by her side. It has always been about a debt, and Lou takes her debts seriously. 

"I will know no freedom until the day I die for you," she says. 

And Lou expects Debbie to react a certain way, prepares for a number of them, but is surprised anyway when Debbie laughs, fond and understanding. "Then we are in the same boat," she says, in this tone of voice, and Lou suddenly remembers - Debbie's father speaking, the two of them still children, little more than,  _Debbie saved her life, and in this world, that makes her Debbie's responsibility for the rest of her life._ "I have not known freedom since the day we met." 

Lou instantly feels foolish, to have thought Debbie wouldn't understand, because after all, they are two sides of the same coin - Lou, her vassal unto death, and Debbie, in turn, her liege, unto death, beyond. 

 

 

When Lou is twenty-three, Debbie heads to the UK to settle some business and Lou follows, as always. While they are there, the Beckers make an attack on the grounds. Debbie's parents die on the spot, and Danny breathes his last in a cold, sterile operating theatre, dying on the table. Sitting in the office of a museum in the middle of London, Debbie Ocean becomes the last living descendant of the Ocean line. 

The flight home is made in silence. Lou sits by Debbie's side and lets Debbie squeeze her hand for hours, never letting go, never doing more than that. They return to an empty shell of a mansion and Debbie takes her seat in her father's office, where she was never meant to belong, not so soon. Lou stands at her shoulder and does nothing more but wait and watch as Debbie makes a short list, the scratch of her pen against paper deafening in the echoing space.

"Lou," Debbie says when she finishes, still not looking at her. "Do you remember what my father said to you, all those years ago, when you first arrived in this house, when he made you his offer?"

No memory is clearer in Lou's mind. "He promised me that one day the Oceans would take their battle to the Beckers, and I would have the chance to be on the front line, to take the head of the man who killed my parents, and I could return to the ashes of my home drenched in blood and glory."

"And you took his head, five years ago," says Debbie. "But the battle is now, and I will have to be the one to lead it. Will you be on the front line with me, after all this time, still?"

And  _oh,_ does Debbie even need to ask? Without thought, without hesitation, Lou goes on one knee, reminiscent of that one life-changing moment more than fifteen years ago in front of a different Ocean, and bows her head. Debbie lifts her chin with two fingers, leans down, forward, so Lou's lips are brushing Debbie's own instead of her hand. "My loyal guard." 

"Unto death," says Lou, who meant it when she was nine, meant it when she was eighteen, means it now, and for the rest of her life. 

**Author's Note:**

> check out the fic this was inspired by if you watched john wick 2! it's amazing & the perfect backstory for ares. 
> 
> as ever, open to o8 requests.


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